My Experts Can Beat Up Your Experts

None of us knows what we’re talking about. That is the problem driving much of our culture-war animus. We can’t possibly understand all the nuances of every field of study, so we rely on networks of competing experts and authority figures to tell us what to believe. I do it, you do it . . . we all do it.

The letter complains that the new APUSH framework pushes an “arid, fragmentary, and misleading account of American history.” The new framework, the letter argues,

Is organized around such abstractions as “identity,” “peopling,” “work, exchange, and technology,” and “human geography” while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution. Elections, wars, diplomacy, inventions, discoveries—all these formerly central subjects tend to dissolve into the vagaries of identity-group conflict. The new framework scrubs away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduces history to a bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces. Gone is the idea that history should provide a fund of compelling stories about exemplary people and events. No longer will students hear about America as a dynamic and exemplary nation, flawed in many respects, but whose citizens have striven through the years toward the more perfect realization of its professed ideals. The new version of the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that self-consciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective.

As a professional academic historian, I’m certainly not neutral in this fight. My sympathies lie with the new framework. Don’t get me wrong: I admit that these conservative charges are not without merit. Academic historians really have isolated themselves over the past forty years. Americans love history, but they find academic history simply beside the point. Academic historians have tended to obsess over issues that only other academics care about, leaving high-schoolers and regular folks to learn their history from journalists and from Hollywood. But that has always been the case with scholarly work and it does not mean that the big lessons of the past forty years should not be taught to high-schoolers.

More important here, though, is the way culture-war issues are often addressed by letters like this one. Because none of us can understand the nuances of every issue, because none of us really understands what all the fuss is about, we rely on networks of competing authorities to give us our culture-war positions.

In the creation/evolution battles, for instance, we’ve seen this time and time again. Nearly every pro-evolution argument these days starts with some statement that mainstream scientists all agree on the fact of evolution. Activist organizations such as the National Center for Science Education compile bulletproof lists of all the scientists who agree that evolution occurs via natural selection. It has always been this way. In the 1968 US Supreme Court case of Epperson v. Arkansas, the National Science Teachers Association submitted a statement signed by 179 leading scientists. Evolution, the signatories told the court, had become a “fundamental scientific principle” supported by all “scientists and other reasonable persons.”

Creationists, of course, have always compiled similar lists of experts. As I noted in my first book, sometimes such lists took over the whole argument. For instance, T.T. Martin’s 1923 book, Hell and the High Schools, was a slim 175 pages. Of those pages, a full 67 were nothing but lists of anti-evolution scientists and experts.

For those few true experts such as Ronald Numbers or Glenn Branch, it is possible to wade through these lists of names to tease out the scientific street cred of each person. For most readers, though, the lists of experts serve only to prove the reliability of writers’ claims.

In every culture-war field, we rely on experts we trust to tell us what to believe. And then we believe it, whether or not we really know what we’re talking about. This doesn’t mean we’re stupid. It doesn’t mean we’re ignorant. As Dan Kahan argues so convincingly, our beliefs about evolution tells us about who we are, not about what we know.

What are we to believe about the new Advanced Placement US History standards? Are they the best wisdom of historians, vetted by true experts in the field and reflecting the latest developments of academic knowledge? Or are they the puerile croaking of a self-satisfied and out-of-touch ivory-tower elite, bent on promoting ideology over true knowledge?

7 Comments

The fact of the matter is that we too often do not know that we do not know. Once settled facts are suddenly challenged with credible evidence, and poof! A belief change takes place. I suppose we do the best we can with what we have. I look for the purpose, the agenda, of a particular author before I dive in. Sometimes this helps me sort out what I find useful; other times, I find a need to move forward on the topic and read what others think. One thing I’m certain of-political agendas must be teased out of any academic work. We all have biases, and if we are to understand a point someone is attempting to make, we must include the individual beliefs of that person as we listen or read what any one person is saying. My problem is that I really don’t know anything about various history experts. I don’t know one from another. I need to ferret out an expert’s worldview to make a judgment. That’s very hard to do when I try to start any research into an area unknown to me. I don’t know what I don’t know.

Great point. We have to trust doctors, scientists, historians, etc., because we don’t even know what we don’t know. This is why the experts themselves rely on credentials. Academics tell people up front where they went to school and where they work. Doctors show off their diplomas. Scientists tout Nobel Prizes and such. The credentials matter so much precisely because we don’t even know which so-called expert is a real one and which is selling snake oil.

M

Some experts with credentials say that other experts with credentials are selling snake oil. People sometimes decide for themselves what snake oil is, and trust the experts with credentials that don’t sell it.

This is why my life has been so interesting as of late. I comb through articles and books about certain issues with which i am unfamiliar, and it is like climbing a mountain. I find a plateau and say “Wow! It’s great here! I never knew THAT before.” Then I climb some more and find another plateau, with the same excitement, and eventually I look up and realize the mountain is much higher than I thought. The little bit that I learn begins to seem even smaller as I keep going. There is always more out there, and I don’t want to miss any of it. But all of that climbing has also made me aware that I must be cautious of certain paths, because they will lead me away from the top. Careful consideration of any source is vital. My biggest red flag is when someone tries to shade the truth, or leave parts out. That’s agenda. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know much at all. There’s a whole world out there with facts just waiting for me to find them..